


the ever-living ghost of what once was

by jaekyu



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: A Ghost Story (2017) - Freeform, Character Death, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, M/M, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-21
Updated: 2020-10-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:41:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27128714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaekyu/pseuds/jaekyu
Summary: You'll always come back to it; the house, and the person you love inside of it.(A ghost story).
Relationships: Minor or Background Relationship(s), Suh Youngho | Johnny/Qian Kun
Comments: 6
Kudos: 32





	the ever-living ghost of what once was

**Author's Note:**

> it's literally a ghost story because it's an au inspired by [A Ghost Story](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_3NMtxeyfk&ab_channel=A24).
> 
> unfortunately, that does, in fact, mean that the entire plot of this fic revolves around the fact that johnny is dead, like, the whole time. the death occurs off-screen and johnny is still technically in the fic after it happens but i tagged for character death for the sake of it, especially because this fic doesn't really have a happy ending. 
> 
> more notes at the end! please enjoy! thank alex for always reading over whatever sad shit i send her without complaint!

every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.   
**— T.S. Eliot**

The morning you die is a morning like any other.

When you had considered the idea of Death in life — the cloaked figure carrying a sickle, not cruel or evil but simply misunderstood, only fulfilling everyone’s destiny over and over again — you thought, maybe, you’d be able to feel it.

That there might be something palpable in the air, a dreadful turning in your gut, a mournful sorrow you wouldn’t know how to shake. The smell of sulfur, or blood, or something like rot. Taste of earth, the sharp kiss of fire, overwhelming weight of sleet. You thought, foolishly, that you might be able to anticipate it. Like the horn on the speeding train before it meets you on the tracks.

But it is not like that. Instead, the day you die you wake the same way you always do: in bed, next to him. There is no dark and stormy cloud rolling in overhead. There is no feeling in your stomach like you swallowed a peach pit.

He is still asleep. His features are always softer in slumber. He does not carry the worry of the day in lines that crease his forehead or the corner of his mouth, or in darkness around his eyes. He is peaceful. You touch his face gently; a thumb across his brow, down the slope of his nose. The morning is still blue. The trees outside, only visible through a small slit in your bedroom drapes, are yellow and orange and brown.

The skin of your thumb grazes over the sweep of his eyelashes. His eyelids flutter. “Good morning,” he mumbles to you, before he even opens his eyes.

“Good morning, baby,” you repeat back to him. He smiles, and his eyes are still closed when you close the gap between the two of you to kiss him. His mouth and his skin are equally warm, and he tastes like love and home, and it’s like any other morning.

It’s a nice morning, all things considered. You’re not sure if you would have done anything differently, had you known. Maybe you would have stayed in bed just a moment longer.

As it stands: you kiss him slowly, sliding one of your legs between both of his. Yesterday, he washed your sheets, and they smell like laundry detergent and the sun. The slide of your mouths is slow, meticulous. You have memorized each other’s mouths by now, after so long together, and yet every morning you repeat this process. You know when he’s stressed you’ll find more teeth nicks in the plush curve of his bottom lip, and he knows in the winter time to remind you to use chapstick.

You push him back against the pillows and he lets you. He laughs, the wind knocked out of him slightly, and you laugh in return. Happiness fills your chest like a balloon on the edge of bursting. You’re not sure you’d ever be able to contain it when you’re around him.

“I’m going to think about you all day,” you tell him, kissing him again. He pushes your hair behind your ears, and the tips of his fingers linger on the shells of them, his hands framing your face.

“I miss you every second I’m not with you,” is his answer. You slide your hands under his shirt, press a palm against the soft hair on his lower belly. He arches into it, arches into your mouth, pushes against you so close you think you might fuse together. “I love you.”

You tell him, “I love you,” in return because you do. Because you do love him.

You’ll love him even in death.

*

Johnny does not remember falling asleep.

Then he wakes up.

It’s cold. There’s nothing but metal beneath Johnny, no buffer between the smooth surface of it and his bare skin. It’s funny; Johnny knows he’s cold, can understand that is the natural reaction he should be having. Knows that, given the circumstances, on any other day, he’d be chilled to the bone. But he doesn’t _feel_ it. He doesn’t feel cold at all.

He rises from the gurney slowly. The sheet laid over him falls away, and it makes no sound as it does. Johnny isn’t wearing any clothes. There is an unnerving tapestry of mottled bruises across his chest. He does not feel sore.

Johnny tries to remember what he was wearing this morning; a beige pair of work khakis, a white button-down. Had he been wearing a tie? No. Not yet. He had tossed it onto his passenger seat, planning to put it on at work, before —

Johnny looks down at himself again. He’s not naked anymore. He’s wearing what he was wearing this morning. Again, he knows this should confuse him. He knows this is not what happens. But he feels no alarm. There is only calm, like a small lake that quietly ripples on occasion.

Johnny’s feet are still bare, when he stands, and they’re dirty. He doesn’t think he can feel the floor — not really. Not in any way that feels tangible. He knows it’s there, that it exists, but it doesn’t feel as if he’s really touching it.

The sun comes through the window slant, creating a shadow longer than the window itself on the floor. The light is deep yellow, tinged in pink. Wasn’t it just morning? Johnny can’t be sure. But it’s all he remembers — he and Kun in bed, early morning, losing themselves in shared space and shared breaths and shared kisses. And then —

What happened next? Johnny must have gotten ready for work. Rolled out of bed, brushed his teeth, took the coffee Kun offered him, kissed him for good measure, told him he loved him. Forgotten his tie until Kun handed it to him. Kun told Johnny to put it on once he got to work, told Johnny to drive carefully, told Johnny he loved him back. And after that? Johnny doesn’t remember falling asleep — but it’s black. It’s all very, very black.

When Johnny turns back to the gurney, the sheet has replaced itself as it was previous: covering the obvious outline of a body. Johnny pauses. He wonders, idly, if he can disturb the sheet at all, in any substantial way. He does not feel as if he affects the universe around him at all.

He pulls back the sheet — Johnny doesn’t think he’s moving it, not really, not in a way anybody else could perceive, but it moves regardless — and reveals his own face, sunken, unmoving. Stiff and cold and lifeless.

There is no panic. Not even at the confirmation. There is only more calm.

*

Johnny is not sure how many days have passed by the time he makes it home. Only that he has seen the sun rise and set more than once, and more trees have shed their leaves in his and Kun’s front yard.

Who will rake those, Johnny wonders. Normally, he’d do it himself. Kun, smiling, bundled in a knit sweater, would wave to Johnny from the big picture window in the living room while he did it, and Johnny would smile back. When he’d finish, Kun would hold both of Johnny’s cold hands in the heat of his own, thumb rubbing back and forth along Johnny’s skin to coax his blood to flow. Then he’d kiss Johnny’s brow and offer to make him something to warm him up.

Johnny will not rake the leaves this time. For now, they lie where they fall, disturbed only by the wind.

When Johnny finds himself inside his home, there are no mourners. But the funeral has passed, Johnny knows this from the evidence: there is an opened and half-finished bottle of wine on the counter and, next to it, leftovers. Offerings that people would have brought. Meat, fish, rice, a container filled with yukgaejang. In the centre of the dining room table, a wreath of chrysanthemums wilts. It is all a crime scene of grief and the pain that comes with it.

It all means that it’s been at least three days. Probably more.

In their bedroom, Kun sits alone at the edge of their bed, cradling one of Johnny’s shirts and staring at the wall.

Johnny wants to say his name. Wants to say _Kun_ and _I miss you_ and _I’m sorry_ , but he lacks the words. It’s like they don’t exist for him, not here. Not in this slightly tilted image of his own world that he’s slipped into, kept from interfering by a two-way mirror.

“Your mom keeps calling,” Kun says aloud and there is a brief moment of elation where Johnny thinks maybe, just maybe, Kun is speaking to him. But then Johnny realizes his gaze has dropped to the shirt in his hands, and Kun is speaking to a version of Johnny he believes no longer exists. “I don’t know how to tell her that she’s making it worse.”

_She’s trying her best_ , Johnny wishes he could reply. _I know the both of you must miss me so much_.

“I miss you every second I’m not with you,” Kun repeats his words from that morning. That morning, before everything went dark. Before Johnny woke up. “I don’t know — I don’t know how to do this without you.”

Kun’s voice catches in his throat. Johnny recognizes the sound immediately, it’s the sound he makes just before emotion overtakes him, pulls him under the surface like an all-consuming wave. Johnny drops to his knees in front of him. _Kun_ , he speaks without saying anything. Johnny meets Kun’s eyes and Kun looks right through him. _I’m sorry, I love you, I’m right here. I don’t want to leave. I’ll never leave if you don’t want me to_. Kun is already crying. Every time Johnny wipes a tear away with his thumb, it reappears, its path down Kun’s cheek undisturbed.

Kun lifts Johnny’s shirt to his face. He breathes in hard, sighs and shakes his head, as if embarrassed of himself. And then he must decide he doesn’t care, because he breathes in deep again. “I love you,” he says to the empty room, and to the Johnny that lives in his heart, and to the Johnny that exists on the fringes of reality, in the room with him.

_I love you_ , Johnny tries to say and ends up saying nothing at all.

*

Johnny’s days are long and the nights are hard to remember once they pass.

Maybe that’s for the best. The nights are when things become their worst.

Kun still only uses his side of the bed. He chases sleep like a lifeline, most nights, and it constantly slips through his grip like smoke. On the better nights, Kun merely curls in on himself, clutches Johnny’s pillow as hard as he can, until his arms begin to shake from the effort. On bad nights, he cries on and off for hours. Sometimes it will be loud, uninhibited sobs that shake his shoulders and seem to exert force on his spine. Sometimes Kun muffles the sounds into his own fist, trying to preserve his pride for no one, because he is alone.

Almost alone. Johnny is always there. On the bad nights, and on the slightly less bad nights. He knows he doesn’t need sleep — but he takes his side of the bed all the same. On the nightstand is the self-help book he had been reading, dog-eared on the same page he had left it. It had been his New Year’s resolution to read more. His glasses lie on top. They are broken. He was going to get new ones. There’s a half-finished glass of water, too. It’s a novelty cup from Chicago. Something Johnny had brought back with him, after he and Kun had moved in together and Johnny had gone to visit family by himself in the States.

Kun does not disturb any of it. He allows himself Johnny’s pillow as comfort, and a single shirt. These days — and Johnny still doesn’t know how many days it’s been, has no concept of time, hours slip away from him, and sometimes full days do the same, sometimes several on end — Kun seems to get frustrated with the shirt.

“It doesn’t smell as much like you anymore,” he murmurs to himself, to the Johnny he would never know is listening.

On the easier nights, Johnny brushes Kun’s hair back from his face and wishes he could say something, anything, to make him feel better, and have Kun hear it. On the bad days, Johnny holds him without Kun being able to feel it, and wishes desperately this could be easier. That he could make this easier.

Johnny feels no sorrow for himself, feels no sorrow for his own death.

It’s seeing Kun like this that hurts. It’s seeing Kun like this that makes Johnny want to stay.

*

Kun leaves for the day. Johnny remains tethered to the house.

He remembers when they first bought it. Johnny has a harder time remembering things from when he was alive, now. More and more, he lacks the synapses to create new memories, as he simultaneously loses the bits and pieces of old ones. He has to try very hard to remember when he and Kun bought this house.

He remembers they had been happy. How many years had they been dating? Johnny can’t remember that part. But it had been a long time. Long enough for Johnny’s mom to start asking him, _when will you marry that boy_? An older woman had sold their home to them. She was moving back in with her daughter after her husband had passed away. All one floor, newly refinished cabinets in the kitchen. They had torn up the carpet in a few rooms and replaced it. Johnny indulged Kun on a thousand trips for new pieces of furniture, hummed approval at every photo Kun showed him of what he hoped their house would one day look like.

“One day,” Johnny remembers saying one evening. Kun had just shown him a photo of a modern-designed kitchen — big windows, lots of light and stainless steel. A chocolate brown coloured backsplash, a marble island, bar stools that matched the rest of the metal. Johnny had sighed and shaken his head, and Kun had climbed on top of him and pinned his wrists above his head and said, _one day, you’ll take my design choices much more seriously_. “I’ll be making lots of money and I’ll buy you your dream home,” Johnny had promised Kun. “And you can have whatever ugly backsplash you want, as many times as you want, and I won’t say a word.”

“Oh. That’s very sexy of you,” Kun had responded. “Tell me more?”

Johnny had smiled, struggled against Kun’s hold on his wrists to get close enough to kiss him. “Does all this talk about stainless steel appliances and walk-in pantries make you hot, baby?”

Kun had teased Johnny for a moment, before he closed the gap between them and kissed him, half-sweetly, half with obvious salacious intent. “Not really,” Kun had shook his head. “But the thing you said about you making lots of money kind of does.”

Johnny mourns for the house that does not exist and that never will.

Across the street, a boy he half-recognizes waves at him. Is he waving at Johnny? There is no one else around. He must be waving at Johnny. Which means —

_What are you doing?_ Johnny asks without words.

_I’m waiting for someone_ , the boy across the streets replies soundlessly. He looks younger than Johnny by a few years. His face is still youthful, his hair that halfway point between freshly cut and in need of a trim, and dark. He looks so familiar but Johnny can’t place them.

_Who?_

_I don’t know_.

Johnny tilts his head. _Will you know when they come_?

The boy shrugs. _I hope so._

*

One day, Kun leaves, and when he comes back he brings someone home with him.

It’s late. Johnny can only tell it is by the brightness of the moon in the sky. He has tried to read clocks before — both analog and digital — but he couldn’t make sense of what he had been looking at.

Kun is drunk, Johnny thinks. He hopes Kun didn’t drive. It’s hard for him to remember why the thought of Kun doing something like that worries him, but he knows it’s supposed to worry him. He doesn’t like when Kun does stuff that worries him. He remembers that, acutely, even if it’s a leftover feeling from when Johnny was alive.

Johnny also remembers, from when he was alive, that he does not like it when Kun kisses other people. And that’s what Kun is doing right now; kissing the person he brought home with him.

The person is another man. He’s smaller than Johnny, more lithe and thin and lean. He has a body like he dances, like he is meticulous with the muscles in his body, knows what they do and what to do with them. Kun pushes him against the kitchen counter and devours his mouth, holding onto his hips. The other man kisses back, threading his hands into Kun’s hair.

Anger rears its ugly head inside of Johnny’s gut. He did not know he could still feel things this strongly in this state. But there it is, gnashing its teeth, making itself known. It’s such a bittersweet reminder of what it was like for Johnny to be human.

Johnny’s focus reduces itself to a pinprick, the point of a sewing needle. He needs Kun to stop kissing this man. If they keep kissing they are going to sleep together — Johnny can tell by the way their bodies respond to one another, and he hasn’t forgotten about sex yet — and Kun can’t do that. Not in the bed he once shared with Johnny. Not with Johnny’s book and glasses still in their designated place on the nightstand.

There is a vase on the counter. It is full of sunflowers. Johnny sends it crashing to the floor.

Both Kun and his partner jump, breaking apart from each other. They’re both turned towards Johnny, but they’re not looking at him, no one ever looks at him. Instead, they are looking at the shards of glass on the floor, the limp corpses of Kun’s sunflowers, the puddle of water they were once sitting in. Johnny looks at the mess, too. He blinks — once, twice — it does not disappear. It does not become one of the things that Johnny affects only to himself, and to this world, and never to anyone outside of it.

This is real. This is something he did and Kun felt.

The stranger knits his eyebrows. “How did that happen?” He asks.

Kun does not answer. His eyes remain fixed to the mess on the floor. Johnny begs him to understand, and then feels selfish for it. It seems the bad feelings stick. The ugly feelings carry themselves much easier into this plane of existence.

“I think you should go,” Kun finally responds.

“Oh,” the stranger looks disappointed. He bites his lip. “Raincheck, then? You can call me. You have my number.”

“Yeah, Ten,” Kun is acknowledging the stranger, but his tone seems dismissive. “I’ll call you.”

Johnny does not notice Ten leave. He simply stands with his mess he made, lying at his feet, and watches Kun.

Kun sinks to his knees in front of the shattered remnants of his vase. The sunflowers have already begun to die. Kun picks one up, gentle with it like it might be something more akin to a baby bird, and rubs a petal between his thumb and forefinger. Johnny does not remember if the yellow colour was brighter before he ruined the flowers, or if colours have just dulled for him in general now.

Next, Kun picks up a shard of glass. It’s one of the larger pieces, a jagged scalene triangle, almost hostile in its appearance. Kun runs his thumb along the edge of it. It slices open Kun’s skin, bringing blood to the surface, smearing it along the glass. Johnny drops to his knees, he’d gasp if he could, and reaches out to hold Kun’s other hand in his. The one still gripped around the stem of the sunflower.

“I’m just trying to be happy,” Kun says, in that broken voice Johnny’s become so familiar with. “I’m just trying to remember how to do things that aren’t missing you.”

Guilt. That’s another bad feeling. That’s another thing that sticks.

*

_I got mad the other day_ , Johnny tells the boy across the street. _I got mad and I scared him._

_That happens sometimes_ , the boy responds. _It’s not your fault_.

Both of them are quiet for a moment. They are always quiet. Neither of them ever actually speak.

_Has the person you’re waiting for come back yet?_

_No_ , the boy shakes his head. _No. I don’t think so._

*

Without Johnny being able to track where this all started, Kun ends up arguing with Johnny’s mother in their kitchen.

“It’s my decision,” Kun says, voice firm. Johnny does not move. He does not want to get angry. He does not want to scare Kun again. “I can’t stay here anymore.”

“This place was important to him,” Johnny’s mother counters. “It’s where the two of you built a life together. How can you give that up?”

“It’s where I _buried_ him, Eomma,” Kun’s voice cracks on the word ‘buried’, and by the time he reaches the term of endearment Johnny’s mother insists Kun call her, he has lost all of his fight. “It’s where I wake up every day and feel his absence like I’m missing my own heart. It’s where everything reminds me of him. I can’t —”

Johnny’s mother’s face has crumbled. Johnny can see in the slope of her brow, the down turn of her mouth, that it is sympathy that does it to her.

Kun sighs. “I can’t do this to myself anymore, okay? I have to sell the house. I have to leave.”

Johnny leaves the people he loves to their argument. He takes the path from the kitchen and down the hallway to his and Kun’s room slowly. Inside, he finds his book and his glasses no longer sit on the bedside table. He finds his shirts — hung in the closet when he was alive, left there by Kun for, well, Johnny has no concept of for how long — packed away into boxes marked _donation_.

Johnny wonders when this all happened.

He wonders how he missed it.

*

The morning he died, you think a little part of you died with him.

You never realized it could happen that fast. But that’s the nature of death, isn’t it? Here one moment, gone the next. You find yourself wishing, in the worst way, that it had been an illness that took him from you. At least then you would have had time to prepare.

But would that have really made a difference? Would any amount of borrowed time with a person you loved as much as you loved him ever be enough?

You miss him in a way you had never been taught to miss anything. Your own mother lives in the home country you left behind, miles and miles away, and still. Still it was never enough to prepare you for the pain of missing him. There are still some mornings when you open your eyes, cocooned in the blankets of the bed you once shared, and for a split second, your sleep-addled brain will convince you he is lying across from you. Lying across from you, already awake, and you tell him _good morning_ and he kisses you and says _good morning, baby_ in return.

It gets worse as time goes on. At the height of your grief, you see him for a split second in the corner of every room you enter. His impression in the bed beside you, his tooth-brush displaced from the spot in its holder, the closet he kept his shirts in with its door wide open. When you leave the house, you swear you could see his shadow against the pavement of your driveway, with no corporeal being to cast it. When you come home, a light you had been certain you turned off would be turned on.

You go back and forth on how you feel about it: some nights it offered comfort, and other nights it offered only pain.

You won’t say that you thought, more than once, that he might have still been in that house with you. But you will not deny it either.

The night after the vase breaks is the night you decide to leave.

It hurts more than you expect, packing everything away. It opens wounds you long thought sutured and healed over. You spend a long time working with a single-minded focus, afraid to think of anything but your task, and you spend even longer crying. It feels like being in the throes of grief again, with its cold grip around your heart and your throat.

But eventually you do it, and you sell the house, and the day before you leave you etch _J + K_ into the wood of one of the top shelves in the kitchen that used to be yours, the place where he used to keep his coffee beans.

“Goodbye,” you say aloud, to your empty house. “I love you.”

And you could have sworn, for a split second, your empty house echoed _I love you_ back to you.

But it was probably nothing.

*

_all worn down; the time for sleep is now_  
_it's nothing to cry about 'cause we'll hold each other soon_  
_in the blackest of rooms_

**Author's Note:**

> a few elaborations:
> 
> 1) The kid Johnny sees across the street is Mark. Johnny recognizes him from the papers -- before he and Kun ever bought the house across the street -- because he was in an accident while riding his bike where he was hit by a car and killed.  
> 2) I know that this is whole thing is very sad and has no happy ending, and for that I'm sorry -- but part of my world-building for this AU included this: in this universe, ghosts are waiting for a person who is still alive that they had a close relationship with before they died. For Mark, this is Donghyuck, who was the other kid riding his bike when Mark was hit and killed. Donghyuck was also hit and seriously injured, but did not die. Because memories fade the longer a ghost sticks around, and it's been many, many years since Mark died, Mark doesn't actually remember this. Yes, eventually, Johnny will forget he's waiting for Kun too. But, on the brightside, in my head, this AU definitely wraps up with them reuniting in death. Johnny definitely remembers who he's waiting for when he shows up <3  
> 3) Title from [No One's Gonna Love You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lnkzfUaDOY&ab_channel=SubPop) by Band Of Horses.  
> 4) Final lines from [I Will Follow You Into The Dark](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FhRQt1vm3A&ab_channel=DeathCabforCutie-Topic) by Death Cab For Cutie
> 
> happy spooky times, my friends!
> 
> [fic twitter](https://twitter.com/bIoodbuzzed), [personal twitter](https://twitter.com/sieepwellbeast), [cc](https://curiouscat.qa/bloodbuzzed)


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